Insight
Zaparde: Low-margin startups face lower valuations and desperate cash needs
“The problem with margins by the way, cause it's like, oh, well, why are low margins bad?
Well, if it weren't obvious, like they're bad because of a couple of things.
One, it means your multiple as a company is lower.
You're less likely to be able to raise mone…”
Opinion
Zaparde: Airbnb needed conflict to stop promotion-driven projects
“There was like, there was a need for change, right? And like a need for like creating conflict within the company to actually ask the hard questions and say, Hey, do we need these folks or are, or, you know, are we actually doing this project because somebody …”
Insight
Zaparde: Early enterprise software must not be free, or feedback is useless
“It is important to charge because I've also seen founders that like want to do a design partner thing, or, you know, it's free for some reason because they're just, As a founder, right? You're like, I have no customers or like a few customers. I don't have con…”
Assertion Supported
Zaparde: Zip reaches 350 employees and $2.2B valuation after Series D
“Yeah, so the company is about 300 fifty-ish people we've raised about three hundred seventy million dollars now, and the most recent round was our Series D at 2.2 billion post last month.”
Disclosure
Zaparde: FlightCar pitched 80 firms and reached two weeks of runway
“I even remember our series a, I pitched, I got to know a lot of people because I pitched like 80 different firms nearly all of whom, except for one said no.
And I remember at a point where we had like two weeks of cash left and we were like
You know, payroll …”
Insight
Zaparde: Unjustified hiring creates self-inflicted pain by forcing employees to generate work
“It's so important to have the right incentives for your team members, because you don't want to create situations where you have a lot of people that, ah, were hired because maybe some people wanted to, you know, build up their functions or teams, and there wa…”
Insight
Zaparde: Closing 10 cold customers indicates true product-market fit
“If you can get 10 different people and 10 different companies in the world to, you know, take out their proverbial credit cards and buy your thing when they don't owe you anything in the world, that means like you're more likely to have market fit.”
Disclosure
Zaparde: A significant majority of Zip's business comes from outbound sales
“Even today, we're a significant majority outbound for urban business today, not inbound”
Insight
Zaparde: Board meetings should focus on what's broken, not what's working
“If we have a board meeting, which obviously we have board meetings, like, I'd rather we just focus on what's broken in the business, because ultimately, that's how we get better. Like, I don't want us to spend a lot of time talking about what's going well, bec…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zaparde: FlightCar parked 200 cars at a BART lot before police intervened
“What happened was that then turned into, like, 200 cars parked at BART over the course of, like, three weeks, and it got, like, we had increased so much parking there that it got reported to the BART police, which they have their own police force, it so turns …”
Assertion Supported
Zaparde: FlightCar scaled to 17 airport locations and washed hundreds of cars daily
“At our peak, we had 17 different airport locations.
It was a very we didn't take, like we took a very sort of asset heavy
Sort of approach, right?
We had, like, leases at 17 different airport facilities.
We had shuttle services to and from the airport.
I mean,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zaparde: Airbnb grew from ~30 to over 100 PMs in under three years
“I think I was the, if I remember, I was like the 30th or something product manager. And then when I left almost three years later, two and a half years later, there were like a hundred something product managers.”
Assertion Supported
Zaparde: Airbnb revenue dropped ~95% during initial March 2020 lockdowns
“I think Airbnb revenue dropped like 95% the week he left, which was, you know, quite a change for the company.”
Disclosure
Zaparde: Zip was created as a mid-batch YC pivot
“Candidly, Zip for us was a mid YC batch pivot. We actually were working on a series of different ideas”
Rujul Zaparde